I have a keyboard and an overactive imagination

Dev Patel in MONKEY MAN (2024)

Reblog with your score

HOW?

My ideal aesthetic is what I'm calling "sexy tomboy". That is to say, I am 100% femme through and through, but I want to look like what a straight man's idea of a "masculine woman" is. I wanna be masc in the way that LaCroix is fruit flavored, just a little extra something to make things a little more interesting

This you?

I don't think I'll ever recover from this one

"Medieval Europe' and 'Indigenous Americans' are very similar in that whenever someone asks a question about either on r/askhistorians I want to pin them down and hold a sabre to their throat until they narrow it down to at least a specific region/culture and particular century.

I think we're starting to dilute the meaning of "terminally online". Like, no, it's not terminally online to have eccentric opinions about a popular TV show – people like that existed before "online" was a thing. Unless we're talking at least an "it's homophobic for gay furries to have rat fursonas because they're depicting gay people as vermin", the onlineness falls well short of terminal.

(via op)

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

The point is, as a game designer, you are never going to win over the all-indie-games-are-too-complicated crowd by explaining how simple your player-facing rules are and how seamlessly they support the narrative, because their experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons is that they can simply opt out of engaging with any player-facing part of the game they don't care for, up to and including opting out of everything and making the GM do all the work, and they're coming from a culture of play which has a vested interest in treating this as a valid preference. It doesn't matter how light your rules are, you're not going to beat an expected level of engagement of zero!

Ugh! She has hexed me with a plague of visions! (Thinking about kissing her)

this is the type of work they’re gonna make high school art students study in ten years

it's kinda comforting to me when my friends are a little annoying or longwinded or abrasive or tired and inarticulate, or they don't do the exact politest thing in every interaction, and stuff, because I know I'm sometimes annoying, or take up a more than my share of conversational space, or forget to ask them questions, etc etc, and... like, I'm always working to be nice to my friends and to get better and better at friend-ing, but it just makes me feel more human about it :}

anyway I love you friends plz know I'm not counting, in fact I feel great affection toward you even (especially) when conversations go less than Perfectly Ideal

I'm not proud to say it but this line from a 60 year old detective novel made me re-think some things about friendship

The Beast that Bothers

theres more

NEW VERSION. :)